Many rocket engine components must be actively cooled. Typically, this cooling is achieved by bonding a channeled liner to the surfaces that must be cooled. Coolant is distributed to and from the liner using manifolds and coolant channel feeds that are located in a backup structure and then bonded to the liner. There are two primary configurations for the channel feeds, both of which have shortcomings. The first method of supplying coolant to the coolant channels involves drilling individual feed passages to feed each coolant channel independently. This method often requires fabrication of an additional intermediate manifold disposed between the primary manifold and the discrete feed passages. There are several drawbacks to using this approach including increased fabrication time and costs, undesirable overall coolant pressure drops, additional machining and bonding steps in the fabrication cycle, precision manufacturing requirements, and blockage susceptibility.
The second method of supplying coolant to the coolant channels in the liner is to use a contiguous channel across all of the coolant channels such that this one feed channel supplies all of the coolant channels with coolant. By using this method, larger and fewer coolant feed tubes can be drilled from the manifold to the feed channel. This approach significantly reduces fabrication costs from the discrete feed passage approach, however, it has limited applicability. The single feed channel results in a contiguous unsupported span in the liner where it is unbonded to the backup structure. This configuration is structurally unacceptable for many high performance cooled products where high-pressure coolants are required. The contiguous unsupported span can limit liner life and result in significant liner deformation during the process of bonding the liner to the backup structure. These two methods of supplying coolant to the coolant channels and their drawbacks will be discussed in detail below in the “General Description” section of this application with reference to FIGS. 1A–2B.
Therefore, in light of the above, there is need in the art for a system and fabrication method for actively cooling high performance components with low cost and high reliability.